Ranking the Vice Presidents: True Tales and Trivia, from John Adams to Joe Biden

By Ian Randal Strock

With all eyes on their Presidential bosses, the Vice Presidents of the United States have often been relegated to the background. But they are an intriguing group, and nowin this unprecedented and meticulously researched volumethe forty-seven men who have held this position take center stage.

Anyone interested in going beyond the headlines and learning about the history of powers behind the Oval Office will want to pore over this one-of-a-kind reference. Here you will find the information you never knew you needed to know about the Vice Presidents, such as who lived the longest, who got married in office, who won the Nobel Prize, and who was charged with treason. Packed with facts, trivia, and lists about all of America’s VPs as well as many of the country’s high-ranking political appointees, Ranking the Vice Presidents presents the hidden history of the nation’s second-in-command.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carrel Books
• Release date: Jul 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781631440618

Book preview

Cover Page of Ranking the Vice PresidentsHalf Title of Ranking the Vice PresidentsTitle Page of Ranking the Vice Presidents

Copyright © 2016 by Ian Randal Strock

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Carrel Books, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

Carrel Books books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Carrel Books, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [e-mail].

Carrel Books® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

Visit our website at www.carrelbooks.com.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Rain Saukas

Print ISBN: 978-1-63144-059-5

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63144-061-8

Printed in the United States of America

For Dad.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

The Vice Presidents

Note on Usage

General Information about the Presidents

General Information about the Vice Presidents

THE AVERAGE VICE PRESIDENT

THE VICE PRESIDENTS: LIFE AND DEATH

1. The Five Vice Presidents Who Lived the Longest

2. The Five Vice Presidents Who Died the Youngest

3. The Five Vice Presidents Who Lived the Longest after Leaving Office

4. The Five Vice Presidents Who Died the Soonest after Leaving Office

5. The Tallest and Shortest Vice Presidents

6. The Most Common Vice Presidential First Names

7. The Most Popular States for Vice Presidents to Be Born

8. The Most Popular States for Vice Presidents to Be Buried

9. The First and Last Vice Presidents to Be Born in the 1700s, 1800s, and 1900s.

10. The First and Last Vice Presidents to Die in the 1800s, 1900s, and 2000s.

11. The Vice Presidents Who Shared Birthdays

12. The Vice Presidents Who Shared Deathdays

13. The Vice Presidents Who Shared Last Names with Presidents

14. The Vice Presidents Who Outlived the Greatest Number of Their Successors

15. The Vice Presidents Who Were Older Than the Greatest Number of Their Predecessors

16. The Vice Presidents Who Had No Living Predecessors

17. The Vice Presidents Who Had the Greatest Number of Living Predecessors

18. The Times There Were the Greatest Number of Living Former and Current Vice Presidents

19. The Years During Which the Greatest Number of Vice Presidents Were Born

20. The Years During Which the Greatest Number of Vice Presidents Died

21. Presidential Terms During Which the Greatest Number of Vice Presidents Died

THE VICE PRESIDENTS: HOME AND FAMILY

22. The Five Vice Presidents Who Had the Most Children

23. The Five Vice Presidents Who Had the Fewest Children

24. The Five Vice Presidents Who Were the Most Older Than Their Wives, and the Five Vice Presidents Who Were the Most Older Than Their Second Wives

25. The Five Vice Presidents Who Were the Most Younger Than Their Wives

26. The Five Vice Presidents Who Predeceased Their Wives by the Longest Time

27. The Five Vice Presidents Who Outlived Their Wives by the Longest Time

28. The Ten Vice Presidents Who Had More Than One Wife

29. The Vice Presidents Who Got Married While in Office

30. The Vice Presidents Known for Having Facial Hair

THE VICE PRESIDENTS: RESUME

31. The Most Popular Colleges Attended by the Vice Presidents

32. The Vice Presidents Who Did Not Attend College or Did Not Receive Degrees

33. The Most Popular Pre-Vice Presidential Jobs

34. The Vice Presidents Who Served in the Government after Their Terms of Office

35. The Vice Presidents Who Were Elected President

36. The Vice Presidents Who Succeeded to the Presidency but Were Not Elected to Their Own Terms

37. The Vice Presidents Who Had Never Held Elective Office before Being Elected Vice President

38. The Vice Presidents Who Won Nobel Prizes

THE VICE PRESIDENTS: ON THE JOB

39. The Five Oldest Vice Presidents

40. The Five Youngest Vice Presidents

41. The Vice Presidents Who Shared Birthdays/Deathdays with Presidents

42. The Five Vice Presidents Who Were the Greatest Number of Years Older Than Their Predecessors

43. The Five Vice Presidents Who Were the Greatest Number of Years Younger Than Their Predecessors

44. The Five Vice Presidents Who Were the Greatest Number of Years Older Than Their Presidents

45. The Vice Presidents Who Died in Office

46. The Vice Presidents Who Served Two Full Terms

47. The Five Vice Presidents Who Served the Shortest Terms

48. The Times There Was No Vice President

49. The Longest Terms with No Vice Presidential Vacancies

50. The Vice Presidents Who Served under Two Presidents

51. Vice Presidential Tie-Breakers

52. Electoral Vote Counters

53. The Vice Presidents Who Ran For, but Did Not Win, the Presidency

54. The Only Vice President to Be Inaugurated Outside the United States of America

55. Elections in Which None of the Presidential or Vice Presidential Candidates Had Been President or Vice President

CABINET MEMBERS

56. The Five Oldest Cabinet Secretaries

57. The Five Youngest Cabinet Secretaries

58. The Five Cabinet Secretaries Who Lived the Longest

59. The Five Cabinet Secretaries Who Died the Youngest

60. The Five Cabinet Secretaries Who Lived the Longest after Leaving Office

61. The Cabinet Secretaries Who Died in Office

62. The Five Cabinet Secretaries Who Died the Soonest after Leaving Office

63. The Most Popular States for Cabinet Secretaries to Be Born

64. Foreign-Born Cabinet Secretaries

65. The Five Cabinet Secretaries Who Served the Longest Terms

66. The Five Cabinet Secretaries Who Served the Shortest Terms

67. The Five Cabinet Secretaries Who Served the Most Presidents

68. The Five Cabinet Secretaries Who Served in the Greatest Number of Different Posts

69. The Cabinet Secretaries Who Later Became President

70. The Presidents Who Had the Greatest Number of People Serve in Their Cabinets

71. The Presidents Who Had the Greatest Number of People Serve in One Cabinet Post

PRESIDENTIAL SUCCESSION

72. The Presidential Succession Act of 1792

73. The Presidential Succession Act of 1886

74. The Presidential Succession Act of 1947

75. The 25th Amendment

76. Next in Line

77. Designated Survivor

SUMMATIONS

78. The Most Common Vice Presidents (Those Appearing in the Fewest Lists in This Book)

79. The Most Uncommon Vice Presidents (Those Appearing in the Most Lists in This Book)

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

When I was little, my mother hung a poster in the house, showing the Presidents’ faces, names, and dates of office. I memorized it.

Soon after that, President Nixon announced his resignation, and my first political memory is asking my parents if that meant that Henry Kissinger would be President, because his was the only other name I knew. My parents explained to me about the Vice Presidency and that Gerald Ford was the new President.

Then I learned more about the Presidents and Vice Presidents—who they were, what they did, how they came to have those jobs—and I developed more and more of an interest in them. I began looking for commonalities, connections between the men who’d been President or Vice President, looking for patterns and signs. What characteristics did they share? What facets of their lives pointed toward their eventual elections? Could I calculate all the numbers to predict who would become the next President? Could I use the information I gathered to figure out whom they’d pick to be their running mates? Was there any chance I could earn those posts myself?

As it turns out, the answers are equivocal. Using those numbers, I was able to predict Barack Obama’s election over John McCain and then his reelection over Mitt Romney. But I did not share those commonalities the Presidents seemed to have, so my odds of getting there are very long indeed.

While I was turning this lifelong interest in the Presidents into my first book (The Presidential Book of Lists, which Random House/Villard published before the election of 2008), I was also looking into the Vice Presidents, 14 of whom went on to serve as President. And I found the Vice Presidents to be no less interesting, individually or collectively.

Thus, I am pleased to present this book, originally conceived as a companion to my first, but definitely able to stand on its own. The Vice Presidents are a much more varied lot, and I hope you’ll find them as fascinating as I do.

The Vice Presidents

The post of the Vice President of the United States is defined in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution. Other than being available to succeed to the Presidency if necessary, the Vice President’s sole Constitutional duty is spelled out in Article I, Section 3 (The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.).

For the first four elections—before the rise of party politics—whoever came in second in the race for President was declared the Vice President. In the election of 1800, however, Presidential candidate Thomas Jefferson and Vice Presidential candidate Aaron Burr tied in the Electoral College, with 73 votes each, throwing the election to the House of Representatives and pointing out the need for what became the 12th Amendment, which provides for the election of the President and Vice President as a team.

The need for the White House, which was originally known as the Executive Mansion, was recognized when planning began for the capital city, during George Washington’s term. But the Vice President was on his own for living arrangements (as is every other appointed and elected official in the government). The Vice President didn’t receive an official residence until 1974, when Congress authorized the transformation of Number One Observatory Circle and its refurbishment. The house was built in 1893 for the superintendent of the US Naval Observatory and taken over by the Chief of Naval Operations in 1923.

Nelson Rockefeller, the Vice President at the time, already had a home in Washington and wasn’t interested in moving into the new official residence, but he used it for entertaining. Walter Mondale was the first Vice President to live there.

Note on Usage

When it’s appropriate to list the Vice Presidents by merely their last names, most of them are unique and present no problem. But there are several names shared by Vice Presidents or that Vice Presidents share with Presidents. In those cases, this book uses the following style: GClinton means George Clinton (who was Vice President from 1805 to 1812); BClinton is Bill Clinton (President, 1993–2001); RMJohnson is Richard M. Johnson (Vice President, 1837–41); AJohnson is Andrew Johnson (Vice President, 1865; President, 1865–1869); LBJohnson is Lyndon Baines Johnson (Vice President, 1961–63; President, 1963–69); HWilson is Henry Wilson (Vice President, 1873–75); and WWilson is Woodrow Wilson (President, 1913–21).

The term First Lady didn’t come into widespread use until the late 1800s, and even into the early 1900s, its use was not universal. While it’s generally used today to mean the President’s wife, in point of fact, the government recognizes the term as referring to whoever serves as the official White House hostess. In this book and Ranking the First Ladies, however, I’ve slightly modified the definition for simplicity’s sake: in these pages, First Lady means any woman who was married to a President before, during, or after his term of office. I’ve also backdated the usage of the term to the beginning of the republic. Similarly, the term Second Lady, in this book, refers to any Vice President’s wife, whether they were married during his term of office or not.

In researching this book and its predecessor, I discovered that there are several methods of determining how closely two people are related. I’ve decided to use the method advocated by the National Genealogical Society, which seems the most common. In this system, to determine what degree of cousins two people are, count generations back to the common ancestor from each of the two people being compared. Using the person most closely related to the common ancestor, the degree of cousinhood (first, second, etc.) is one less than the number of generations between them. The degree of removedness (once removed, twice removed, etc.) is the number of generations difference between the two people being compared.

For example, James Madison and Zachary Taylor shared a pair of great-grandparents, Col. James Taylor and Martha Thompson. Their daughter Frances was President Madison’s grandmother, while their son Zachary was President Taylor’s grandfather. So we use the box on the left side for great-grandchild (James Madison) and the box at the top for great-grandchild (Zachary Taylor), and where those lines intersect, we see that they are second cousins. If, for another example, the common ancestors had been Zachary Taylor’s great-great-grandparents, we would use that line on the top to find that the two Presidents were second cousins, once removed.

When discussing grandparents and grandchildren, I’ve used a parenthetical number for more than two greats, for simplicity’s sake. Thus, great(5)-grandparents means great-great-great-great-great-grandparents.

Some older records are incomplete, notably birth dates for some women who married early Vice Presidents (for example). In cases where no date can be determined, those people have been ignored when calculating (for instance) averages of all the Vice Presidents’ wives.

The information in this book is current as of December 31, 2015. For the latest news and updates, read my blog at uspresidents.livejournal.com or IanRandalStrock.com.

General Information about the Presidents

General Information about the Vice Presidents

THE AVERAGE VICE PRESIDENT

Averages tell us about groups and enable us to make predictions about any member of the group, but they can’t tell us about the possibility for something new. Thus, any list of the average Vice President will not help us predict the odds of a woman becoming Vice President. After gathering all the data, preparing this book, and calculating all the comparisons, I was able to define the Average Vice President. As with my Presidential book, it was one of my original goals to figure out what qualities these men shared and see if those characteristics might match myself (they don’t).

In some cases, I had to omit certain Vice Presidents when calculating the averages (for instance, when calculating life span, the currently living Vice Presidents were not included). With these caveats, we can calculate the average Vice President. He (and looking at the 47 men who have held the office, the average Vice President is 100 percent male):

has a life expectancy of 72 years, 211 days (George M. Dallas is the most average in this respect, having lived 72 years, 174 days)

has a two-in-five chance of being named John, Charles, George,